Ah great. My Starlink hardware just arrived.
I wasn’t charged any high-demand surcharge though. I probably wouldn’t have ordered it if I had to pay one of those.
I don’t think my area will have high demand for Starlink anyway. Even their fastest options are slow. There are options for like 5-10x the speed around the same price in my area. The only downside: There’s like a 50% chance of lightning frying my modem each year, and it takes like a week to get a tech on site.
Starlink is a great backup connection. It’s cheap to just keep in standby mode (~$15/month, IIRC). An unexpected, heavy surcharge might be a deal breaker though
“I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it’s the only genuine option we have,” former Nebraska state senator and Republican Julie Slama told the Washington Post last month. “Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they’re free to raise prices at will.”
Should we pull up the record and see who voted to allow that to happen in Nebraska while on the subject?
“We only have the option to use this hyper expensive private satellite service… because we spent all of the wired rollout grants/funding on bullshit.”
because we spent all of the wired rollout grants/funding on bullshit.
Oh, it’s worse than that. The grant money was the wrong party color, so it had to be disposed of rather than lead to a positive outcome.
But you see, if they took the grant money and used it for something that people liked, they’d have to admit that the party they don’t like did something useful! Can’t have that!
Sending money to a clown and NOT expecting a fucking circus, are we?
You should only be a Starlink customer if you have no other feasible choice.
We’ve noticed that our service no longer works properly, so we’re going to charge you more for it.
This is sooo on cue, right as my AI loving IT colleagues are talking about getting starlink, only to have a backup internet connection in case of an outage.
“High demand” meaning underprovisioning.
“I can complain about Starlink raising their prices, but it’s the only genuine option we have,” former Nebraska state senator and Republican Julie Slama told the Washington Post last month. “Once they have rural customers on their service with no meaningful alternatives, they’re free to raise prices at will.”
Yes, that is what everyone has been warning about for years and why we want the communication monopolies torn down… Fucking leopards running loose out here eating faces and they still just kinda shrug and go “wish there was an alternative to letting all the leopards run free eating our faces”.
To be fair, if you’ve ever had to use HughesNet, a leopard eating your face is a welcome change of pace.
Goddamn HughesNet. I had vehicle dealerships on that fucking piece of shit for their parts system and payroll. What a horrible service, for thousands of dollars a month.
Brother… You speak the truth…
The country that invented the internet… has the worst internet infrastructure in the developed world. Worse than some developing countries too. Astonishing.
astonishing
No, its pretty in character.
No, we in Germany are almost as bad for almost those prices.
That’s more astonishing to me.Is it really??
I used to be jealous of some friends with their 10mbit symmetric lines while I was getting a whopping 4mbps (down only) on cable. (Obviously… not recent).
While most around us (Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands for example) have either 10gbit fiber amd or cheap internet, Germany meanwhile has much DSl or coax commections. Fiber is getting popular and is subsidized heavily (you basically receive it for free to the house when signing a contract for some years) a good chunk of seniority are refusing it with “Well, DSL was already enough for me. I don’t need this new fangled stuff. And it costs 75-100% thab my current contract for more unneeded bandwidth. Nah, I’ll pass on the offer”.
Meanwhile the grandson in 30 years will be very “thankful” for a house in a good condition and having to order a telecom contractor to connect the house to fibre network for 10k €. Just because granny was (not unjustified) a bit cheap.
And this analogy can be expanded to the highest of governments in Germany.
Old rich people, disconnected from reality, ruling over the commoners and deciding their fates.
Just recently our local newspaper showed an example of it.
A divorced/widowed father with a grods income of 5000€ would receive more state child support than an equal family with an income of 3500€.Just why…
Quote from the paper (feel free to use a translator of choice)
Das Finanzministerium nannte Beispiele. Demnach soll beispielsweise ein Paar aus Pflegekraft und Busfahrer mit je 2.800 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern 2028 eine Entlastung von rund 632 Euro im Jahr bekommen. Ein Paar aus Erzieher und Elektrikerin mit je 3.200 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern bekommt rund 642 Euro mehr.
Ein Paar aus Lehrerin und Ingenieur mit je 5.000 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern kann mit rund 678 Euro mehr rechnen. Eine alleinerziehende Pflegekraft mit 2.800 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern soll mit rund 468 Euro entlastet werden, eine alleinerziehende Erzieherin mit 3.200 Euro brutto und zwei Kinder mit rund 471 Euro und ein alleinerziehender Lehrer mit 5.000 Euro brutto und zwei Kindern mit rund 496 Euro.(I really hope I understood the article correctly and not making a fool out of myself. But the idiocracy should be enough to see where it’s generally going here in Germany)
That is… frankly just nuts, and I’m sorry to hear it.
It sounds like the majority are still on the same connections I was envious of 30ish years ago, and the government certainly isn’t helping things.
It got certainly faster (16 to 50 mbps for me. Which is moatly sufficient) and most of the MSP cliemts I work with have a 100-500mbps to a rare 1gbps wire but it’s rarely a given.
the US didn’t invent the internet. yes the US made ARPNET, which is the underlying functions that the internet was built upon. but the internet that we know today wasn’t created in the US, the WORLD wide web was created in Switzerland in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). the world wide web, or the internet, uses a lot of the same protocols that ARPNET created. but ARPNET is not and was not world wide until Sir Tim used the same protocols to allow regular people to traverse ARPNET from around the world. the US built the underlying tech, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee and CERN built the internet on top.
The web is a layer on top of the internet. They’re not the same thing.
How could someone who knows all about computers and networking not predict the logistics problems for such projects? /s
The world’s first trillionaire doesn’t get to call anyone else greedy.
Clearly it does.
That tweet is almost impressively stupid.
What the fuck does the download size of Wikipedia have to do with anything?
I can also fit some of the largest LLMs on my phone. Where is all that AI investment going to???
Bad example, maybe.
I just can’t imagine having such excessive wealth and not saying “eh, whatever” when someone tells me I’m losing money on some internet fees.
You fucker, you could make the world at least a tiny bit better for billions of people at virtually no expense to you, but you just keep playing your stupid fucking rich manchildren games with your billionaire parasite buddies.
Keep grinding bro, maybe this way you’ll get used to the feeling of having your bones crushed in the grinder.
It makes more sense when you realize his wealth is all smoke and mirrors based on a shared lie.
You don’t get that wealthy in the first place by not gobbling up every fucking penny you have a chance to. You think he’s just going to take the dub and stop?
It isn’t just the company leader. It is the brigade of product managers, pricing accountants and more that are involved in these types of corporate consensus decisions.
There is a fleet of people who see their bonuses, commissions, and rev share increasing.
Greed is contagious.
How else you get to inflate the stock price?
You got to get the returns on it.It’s not evem really losing money it’s inventing in the infrastructure youre using to make money.
That’s why you’d never attain that wealth.
I know, he’s better than me by a factor of his net worth divided by my net worth. So around, what, 100 millions times?
Not better, just a hoarder.
It’s why there are no good rich people.
Poor Elon, down to his last Trillion
First trillion?
America will do anything except lay some fucking cable to provide internet to the ruroids.
Including paying companies specifically to lay that cable then never forcing them to actually do it.
It’s crazy how behind US is on that. Americans say “yeah but US is bjg and mostly empty space” so is Asia and the rest of the world yet they are not defeated by a cable. It’s just cable laying - come on, we solved cable laying 50 years ago.
The US has a weird mix of big emplty spaces, really fucking expensive existing underground utilities and roadways, and private property (easements ain’t free) that makes new underground utilities stupidly expensive to run.
You have to buy big easements, negotiate utility contracts with local and state governments (to use the public right-of-way), dodge existing infrastructure while repairing what you break, and lay a fuckton of cable.
I work on the municipal side, and despite Google Fiber having a utility agreement with us for years they still have yet to lay a single foot of underground fiber because we won’t allow them to cut across roads that we just replaced in the last year, require their microtrenches to follow engineering standards, and they need to show existing underground water, gas, wastewater, and electrical services on their plans because they’re famous for just running a trench and making it the water district’s problem when they cut 7 public lines in an hour.
How many big empty rural areas in Asia have fiber optics internet relative to big empty rural areas in the US? I thought starlink was heavily used by a lot of counties where people didnt have great access to internet?
How many big empty rural areas in Asia have fiber optics internet relative to big empty rural areas in the US?
I think China has done it for all of their rural villages (or maybe 98% it seems)
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201908/02/WS5d43f3c6a310cf3e355639b3.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1043951X22001110
Basic all rural areas have fiber/cell towers in Asia. Depends how you measure it but like 90% of populated Asia is connected and most of these stats are only being held back by Russia too.
Same reason rural places in the US also haven’t discovered electricity yet. Oh, wait…
It does seem like that at times. But at least in Minnesota, the ruroids often seem to have better availability of fiber than the suburbanites and exurbanites. Possibly due to state broadband grants.
This is how it was where I grew up in Washington State. We were not rural enough for our neighborhoods to qualify for grants, but not densely populated enough for it to be financially worth it to lay cable. I moved out in 2018, where the best options were still dial up or conventional sattelite.
I did discover that by voiding Cricket Wireless’ TOS you could use your BYOD as a hotspot with unlimited data and you’d just have to change sims/numbers every few months when they caught on. Of course now Starlink and T-Mobile home internet exist instead and hey, maybe they laid cable in the past 8 years, it’s possible.
I have a neighbor who has access to 1gb cable and 1gb fiber from two ISP’s. Both have high data caps. Instead he is rocking the starlink and I can’t for the life of me figure out how he thinks that shit is somehow better than a hard link.
I don’t run starlink, but I run Starry (fixed point wireless) when AT&T and Spectrum are available because:
- I do networking for a living, including wireless (or technically my coworkers do). I know how this thing works and what it’s limitations are
- I live in an area where it almost never rains, so little to no attenuation
- AT&T is on my banlist after shutting down my account for migrating to a 5G phone not on their approved list. Customer service didn’t even let me transfer the sim back to the old 4G phone. The account termination was immediate. I ended up convincing customer service that I needed my phone number for emergency contact, and immediately transferred the number elsewhere upon it being restored.
- Spectrum routing is shit
- Wireless can be as good (or even better) than wired in ideal conditions (see 1), my current 1Gbps plan also only costs $20/month.
telecom operators in america can terminate your service if you use the wrong phone? wtf?
They were checking against a whitelist of IMEIs to force people to migrate to 5G phones. While my new phone was 5G, it was acquired internationally and thus not on the whitelist. So as soon as it got on the network, the line got terminated.
that’s nuts. you’re not allowed to use 4g dumb phones???
Starlink and your short hall wireless solution are not really in the same ball park. I’m sorry for your problems with ATandFee. I use them for 1gb fiber. It hasn’t dropped once in the nine months or so I’ve had it. I had cable internet for 14 years before that. For ten of those years I was the sysadmin for the company. It was a local Four city cable company that finally sold out to a larger operation. We maintained a really high availability with most outages being upstream of our connections. We helped maintain several wireless bridges for commercial companies who were outside our service area and in heavy rain or even fog the signal would drop on a ten mile shot. The 60ghz short hall links also would also suffer from interference from weather on occasion… No wireless connection is as stable as a fiber link. None of them and they never can be.
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I agree LEO Sat is different from 60GHz. But the detrimental effects of wireless is completely overblown. People running into issues should just run a signal test first to make sure it’s not their setup that’s the problem.
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There is no such thing as weather in SoCal (other than that one week of continuous rain each year).
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If you are just looking at 4 9s or 3 9s latency while the link is not saturated, it’s fine for general use (assuming my first bullet point holds). It’s not like I’m running aws off of my home network.
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Even in the rain, the latency is mostly fine. It’s usually just the minute it starts raining that the latency goes through the roof. My assumption is that it’s sampling and adjusting the modulation/coding scheme.
Let me tell you a little story about a 2008 Chevy truck. Around 2018 we had daily interference with our satellite receivers. It was a ongoing problem and we couldn’t find anything wrong. We changed out LNB’s and even the receivers. Ran temporary cable replacements on the ground. Finally someone noticed out outdoor wifi was going down at the same time as our other problems. We fired of a spectrum analyzer hooked to a tuned 5ghz dipole and nothing out of the ordinary. The next morning our CEO was calling cause fox news went out in the middle of his daily indoctrination and he was getting calls from his assholes buddies he golfed with were not getting their fix of manufactured outrage. We go to the headend and sure enough its out and the spectrum analyzer was showing a massive signal wider than the analyzer could display at once.
We of course were dealing with the problem and didn’t notice the twenty year old in one of our old trucks loading up what he needed to bury some drops that day. We also didn’t notice as soon as he drove off that everything started working again. After a few minutes of getting our ass chewed when the CEO called and wanted to know what we did and we had done nothing, our operations guy called the kid in the chevy back for something unrelated. As soon as he drove up everything went tits up again and it dawned on us all it was that truck. We switched him to a different vehicle and parked that one. After replacing a number of parts the problem went away on the truck.
It doesn’t matter if its the weather or if it exists in you corner of the world. It can be anything cratering your signal. I’ve seen old lighting ballast interfere and all manner of electrical appliances. I know you can’t be convinced because it hasn’t happened to you yet but wireless is a poor poor substitute for a hard link.
I’ve mentioned plenty of times under ideal conditions. If the condition is as you say (where there is known massive interference) I’d say that’s a good indicator to either 1. figure out what the interference is and whether it’s possible to mitigate it or 2. Switch to a hard link. This is very much the right tool for the right place problem.
For a majority of users wireless is definitely sufficient and that they can tolerate a reasonable amount of disconnects/drops/latency spikes. I’m not saying for every scenario wireless is a good substitute, but it can definitely handle certain scenarios good enough for home users for a fraction of the cost.
Besides, if I’m not having any major sources of interference now but somehow that develops later, that’s no different than getting a congested link at peek hours, or a faulty switch somewhere along the path 2 years down the line. It’s just another form of network disruption, those can develop in the same way in hard links.
Side note: I’ve done work over ssh and webapps with a constant 200-500ms latency and periodic disconnects for prolonged (months) periods of time. It is absolutely usable though a bit slow. I’ve even played PvP in MMOs (SWTOR, ESO) with those network stats back in the day and still managed to do well enough. People overestimate the quality of Internet service they need all the time.
Under ideal conditions or any conditions a wireless connection can never equal a hard link. End of story. You keep trying to convince me what you said had merit when Its clear I don’t think it does. Unless you live in a dessert you are exposed to constant interference including congestion brought about by simply sharing that single link aka the wireless spectrum you operate at with everyone else nearby. Whereas If you have a fiber link back to the switch and the line isn’t oversold you wont have congestion problem on your last mile. The last mile of your connection is shared with everyone whereas mine currently isn’t being shared with anyone or more to the point I get what I pay for with little worry someone is gonna install a shitty appliance and start knocking my internet out.
You’re still missing my point. What type of application are you running at home that requires that level of SLA? If you are somehow running something that has that type of reliability/QoS constraints, how can you guarantee that your residential ISP with a fiber connection isn’t oversubscribing the links, causing the same sorts of periodic service disruption outside of the end user’s control?
I see no reasonable situation where user experience for home applications would degrade over wireless any more than bgp policy misconfigurations or congested links would. Especially when Spectrum drops packets to NTT almost every Monday night.
As a side note, high frequency trading uses shortwave instead of fiber for transferring data due to latency reasons. There is nothing saying wireless is always worse in latency than fiber. But that’s no longer in the realm of home use, so I don’t really think it matters.
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This is why satelite internet is a dead end. The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Even if we have a complete satellite roll out we’d still have to go back to cell towers for better latency. So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
Satellite is better for remote people. I know a woman whose Alaskan village (indigenous, not colonizer) got significantly better internet once starlink was rolled out.
Now you could say that nations with meaningful duties to remote peoples should band together and essentially jointly operate (maybe having the UN administer it) such a service for them and use it as the last resort akin to sat phones. And I’d be cool with that. But I so think such people should have internet, and this is probably cheaper than running and maintaining cables all across Alaska and northern Canada.
5G is the answer for most people. The few people living in extremely remote places are not worth rolling out special satellites for them. It will not be profitable. They can use existing satellite services for basic communication.
That’s true, but it’s largely due to a market that doesn’t prioritize remote clients and a regulatory system which has roped off huge parts of the radio spectrum.
Instead of a starlink receiver talking to low orbit, you could have a dish that uses fixed wireless access or point to point connections to access a terrestrial tower. In exceptional situations geostationary satellites make sense, but these low earth constellations are getting out of control.
We had point to point internet for years. Then they went belly up. Which is why we have starlink today.
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
You only need a few in a space where there is a lot of room, and it won’t bug anyone, contrary to the shit show we have with the countless starlink satellites visibly zipping over while working hard to make the Kessler Syndrome a thing.
I’m not even talking about the pollution caused by those rocket launches
Give them internet via a geo stationary satellite.
We have that already. Its comparatively very expensive, and also very very high latency simply because for the speed-of-light. The satellite at GEO sits at 20k kilometers. That by itself introduces 250ms of latency each way. So a 500ms latency is not uncommon for GEO satellite internet. Also, GEO satellites are very expensive because of how much energy (deltaV) it takes to get the satellite out that far and for how long they have to operate to make that money back.
Yeah, my family was forced to get starlink because ATT and other wireless internet sucks in where we live
But it’s not better. It’s just rhe only option. They would very much prefer to be connected with a cable or a cell tower no? Why wouldnt they?
You have permafrost melting so northern tundra areas will be worse to build on going forward. But the context is tiny rural places that don’t have roads and you travel by plane or snowmobile, they’re not getting cable.
Could do point to point wireless. And only have towers every so often. The land is cwey flat.
How many people is that? Maybe a million in the entire world? Less? I dont think internet is on their mind that much tbh
they’re not getting cable.
why not?
Hundreds of miles of expensive cable because terrain make expensive to serve dozens of hundreds.
It’s significantly cheaper still. Cable is dirt cheap, technology of laying cable is mature and we already have roads developed to piggy back off infra off. Now think about satellites that only live a few years and are incredibly expensive and immature.
20,000-30,000 miles to cover 250,000-300,000 people (I looked for numbers based on places with at least 100 people) for a total cost of $2,000,000,000-$7,000,000,000.
Good luck with that.
Which part of permafrost do you not understand?
Beyond permafrost it’s also extremely remote and often separated from Anchorage (metro area has the majority of the population of Alaska, at a similar population to the city of Cleveland) by national parks, mountains, and rivers. It’s very expensive to run cable out to such small populations
Do they have electricity?
Cables dont freeze lol
Ah. I see. You’re thinking to let the fiberglass cables lose on top of permafrost like it’s a hose from a shed.
If you’re able, you can learn why that is a bad idea online. There is plethora of reasons why fiberglass cables usually go underground.
Oh shut up with the colonizer bs. So its OK for the indigenous to use a Nazis system because burns hits them.
And even then, why the everlasting fuck do you want low watch orbit satellites for this? Why do we need to pollute the shit out of our ecosystem, our LEO, and our night sky (fuck those moving blips) just to have latency low enough to play a game over na internet connection that shouldn’t be used for any of that…
Everything about starlink is maddeningly stupid and it is negatively impacting so many people that want nothing to do with it but hey, it’s Elmo Musk, so just let him do that shit anyway!
I’d say LEO is where we want these, no? My understand is that if SpaceX went defunct tomorrow, the satellites would (eventually) burn up on reentry, so there’s no risk of them managing to fragment and become more permanent bullets wizzing around in our orbit. Or is that incorrect?
That’s sort of like saying you’d want the milk to spill in the kitchen because it’s easier to clean up. But the thing people are upset about is that the spilling of milk in the first place is not necessary.
Satellite internet is extremely important for certain regions of the world. Good luck running anything to remote areas like Alaska, or areas of northern Canada.
It’s an extremely important piece of infrastructure, even if you have zero use for it.
Thousands of satellites are immune to anti satellite missile, with only a few dozen geosats one country could blow up those sats and cut a few ocean cables and cut off most of the International transocean internet access. That’s a good thing, because it makes it so that any nation preparing for war isn’t tempted to cut off internet because it wouldn’t work anyway.
This is why satelite internet is a dead end.
Idk if I’d call it a dead end so much as a service of last resort. There’s definitely utility in a global network of always-on wireless communication. But because it’s expensive to deploy and saturated quickly, you can’t operate at the volume of a wired network or local wireless system.
So why even entertain this detour if not for war machines - one niche where satellites are actually better.
I think you’ve answered your own question. The incremental value of satellites as part of a weapons system far outstrips normal business applications (nevermind consumer markets).
But you still run into the same constraints at a certain scale. Even if your transmission system is unassailable, it cannot support the volume of traffic of wired connections. So you’re still going to see drone pilots with enormous spools of fiberoptic wire moving along the battlefront.
The latency and bandwidth are fundamental limitations of physics which are incredibly expensive to scale up compare to cable and cell towers.
Latency is theoretically much better because the speed of light is much faster in the vacuum of space than fiber optics. So the ping from continent to continent is better using a satellite network that transmit data to each other using laser light.
I suspect we could be moving the orbit of the satellites higher so we can reduce the insane number of them, while still have better ping. I don’t see a technical reason why bandwidth would be more limited in space than on the ground. It’s fundamentally easier to scale since you can just launch more satellites along certain orbits to add bandwidth.
The fundamental problem is of course privatization and the inevitable monopoly. It will never really be cheaper than land based internet, and so both will continue to coexist, so it just adds additional resource waste for no real benefit except to make some guy rich.
Vacuum of space? Dude there’s an entire atmosphere with clouds and shit in it.
In low earth orbit?
yes, where else it would be?
So what are you trying to say? You signal goes up a few kilometers, then you’re in near vacuum in space where signal travels with proper light speed and results in faster transcontinental ping.
There are no clouds and atmosphere in space. That is what makes it space.
EDIT: Actually radio signals already travel near speed of light in the atmosphere. Only light in fiber optics is about 66% of speed of light.
EDIT2: Oh wow, a Chinese research initiative just achieved a breakthrough with hollow core fiber optics which does transmit close to the speed of light. This could render that advantage of sattelite internet moot! Upgrading cables is going to be a massive infrastructure project though.
and what’s in those few kilometers? not atmosphere? Sure the signal travels a bit faster between satellites themselves but this is not relevant in modern networking. Almost everything is cached on edge in your regional server these days so only “the last mile” is what matters for latency. Even if you ignore all this the math would still favor cable every time - 66% reliable speed of light will always beat “potential 100% speed of light sometimes for some part of the distance”
Ping
I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an article in high finance tech, where they were dealing with billions of transactions per second and relied on sub-millisecond timing. They still used terrestrial long-haul (cross-continent) microwave tower networks for this because even the time it took to transceive between optics and electrons in each switching segment meant fiber was slower. The latency tolerance for those applications preclude the drive up and down to space.
